In the first of what will become a monthly feature, this episode finds Matt and Ed discussing the career of director Richard Linklater, the veteran of American independent cinema who is currently the toast of the town thanks to the critical and commercial success of Boyhood.

December saw the release of the third and final film in Peter Jackson's Hobbit trilogy, a series which saw the man who turned a series of dense books into three fairly swift films do the opposite by transforming a short, snappy novel into three bloated epics. As fans of Jackson's Lord of the Rings films, not to mention his pre-LOTR work, who were disappointed by the Hobbitses, Matt and Ed decided to sit down and talk about the two trilogies in depth in order to figure out where the second trilogy went wrong. Along the way they talk about Star Wars, discuss the desirability of dwarfs and coin the term "Twilightise".

Happy New Year! We're back and we're looking forward to what lies on the horizon in 2015 in our traditional preview. We talk about the films we're excited about, the ones that we're curious about, and the ones that are sure to dominate the cultural conversation for weeks and months at a time. We also highlight some TV shows that we're excited about, and offer (hopefully) tantalising glimpses of what we have planned for the podcast itself in the year ahead.